Your Best "standardized" backup Scheme for SOHO?

zapp22 · 17 May 2012

I need some thought-provocation, gang.

I am trying to land on a more or less "standardized" approach to setting up a usable data backup rig for Small Offices. Out there in the working world, I see all sorts of messes in this regard, virtually none of them reliable, and in practice, virtually none of them workable. In other words, the weak link is the user/administrator, with varying degrees of culpability due to software, hardware, etc etc

"one shot" NAS with redundant drives/RAID? Custom-built [by me] Windows-based RAID-capable net-attached backup drone? [i essentially do this on my own home/office net]

Like you, I see nothing that takes the burden off me or the user - all have flaws, all subject to maintenance.

For the purposes of this discussion lets assume the user for whatever reason does not want to go the cloud route. And lets assume also that the individual users are OK with backing up to a central location [that is, willing to trust the whomevers]

Your solution?

pparks1 · 17 May 2012

Get rid of physical servers in the offices. Use bare metal hypervisors like VMWare vSphere. Set up servers as VM's. Install a software solution like Veeam to backup the VM's. Backup VM's at least daily, try to keep backups offsite if possible in case of disaster.

This solution will come with a bit of cost. You have to use a licensed copy of VMware in order to use Veeam. And you also have to pay for Veeam.